88 AI MAGAZINEOne of the most exciting emerging areas of research in AI today involves the study and development of what I will refer to as holistic systems. These are AI systemsthat involve an end-to-end integration of many computa-tional elements composing various stages of perception, lan-guage, cognition, and action. One, sort of canonical, exam-ple of such a holistic system, would be a cognitive robot inwhich these stages of computation were grounded in the realworld (Ortiz 2016). Such holistic systems are to be contrast-ed with narrower systems that employ a much smaller num-ber of elements (say, a natural language interface to a data-base) and in which design considerations are not aschallenging.

; This column describes work being
done at Nuance Communications in
developing virtual personal assistants
(VPAs) that can engage in extended
task-centered dialogues and that involve
the coordination of many complex modules, along with conversational and collaborative support to such VPAs.